New strategies in muscle-invasive bladder cancer: on the road to personalized medicine.

Bladder cancer remains one of the most deadly and expensive diseases affecting modern society. The options currently available to patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer have remained essentially unchanged for the last generation. As the roles for surgery and chemotherapy in the management of this lethal disease have become better defined, so too have the limitations of these two treatment modalities. Despite the lack of groundbreaking clinical advances over the past two decades, recent years have witnessed a notable increase in the amount of promising preclinical and early translational research that will greatly improve our understanding of the molecular underpinnings of bladder cancer. If this momentum in bladder cancer research continues to build, it is likely that in the next 5 to 10 years we will be able to achieve our goal of bringing bladder cancer treatment into the age of personalized medicine. ©2011 AACR.